Australia News

In Mission X 14 Australia had 848 children involved across 11 sites/schools and placed 7th out of 23 countries involved. That was a lot of kids learning about health and wellbeing and training like an astronaut.

Mission X 2015 is open for schools to signup until 12th December so get your registrations in before the closing date.

VSSEC staff have taken boots and backpacks out to schools to add to the fun of the Astronaut Agility activity and the Discover/Explore activity. The equipment was taken from our Mission to Mars program. The boots are a bit too big for primary school students but they had great fun running in them. (They are worn over normal shoes.) We took the computers and batteries out of the astronaut backpacks so that students could use them to carry rocks. Mission controllers had a list of rocks for collection which they had to communicate to the astronauts. The communication method chosen was mostly yelling! One creative group arranged a system of hand signals which worked very well.
Students recorded their heart rates before and after the exercise. For some this was the first time they had ever felt their pulse.

VSSEC is helping schools in Australia and particularly in Victoria become involved in Mission X. One of the supports we are offering teachers is a template for students’ mission logs. Students in the rest of the world are more than welcome to use this and modify it to suit themselves. We have also produced a very short quick guide for teachers with a very basic description of each activity. We are using this primarily to aid the discussion with teachers who are considering the program. I have put the two documents on Dropbox. Click on these links to download a copy:-